Dec 30, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

🛎️ Meta Acquires Manus

Plus: Cursor Faces Displacement, Hollywood AI 2025 Recap

Good Morning, AI Enthusiasts!

AI advanced fastest outside traditional strongholds and where power shifted toward whoever can actually ship, not just promise.

AGENTS

Manus Joins Meta As Agents Enter The Big League

In late December, Meta finalized the acquisition of AI agent startup Manus, with market estimates placing the deal between one to five billion dollars. The pace was striking. Negotiations reportedly closed in days. Manus is not known for flashy demos. It is known for execution. Since launch, it has processed roughly 147 trillion tokens and created more than 80 million virtual machines. This move signaled that agents are no longer an experiment. They are being pulled into the core.

The deal exposes a shift in how the agent layer is valued. Building agents that reliably act across tools, systems, and workflows is expensive and operationally heavy. Compute scheduling, failure recovery, and orchestration matter more than clever prompts. Meta already owns distribution through WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. What it lacked was dependable follow through. Buying Manus fills that gap instantly and turns conversational AI into something that can transact, automate, and close loops at scale.

This acquisition hints at where the agent market heads in 2026. Scale, capital, and infrastructure start to dominate. Smaller teams struggle to match reliability demands. The field compresses toward giants like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Agents look less like products and more like strategic assets.

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CODING

Vibe Coding Looks Fast Until Software Starts Failing Quietly

At the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference, Cusor CEO Michael Truell warned that vibe coding trades understanding for speed. Developers let AI generate entire systems without inspecting the code. It works at first. Products ship faster. But the structure underneath becomes opaque. Truell framed this as technical debt, yet the timing matters. This warning arrives as tools like Lovable pull users away from IDE based workflows entirely by removing the need to touch code at all.

The deeper tension is not code quality. It is incentive alignment. According to AI Secret team research, many AI founding teams do not care about fine grained code control. They care about shipping something usable as fast as possible. Lovable compresses product creation into minutes and expands the builder base beyond engineers. That growth speed stresses the IDE middle layer. Cursor assumes teams still want visibility and intervention. Vibe coding tools assume outcomes matter more than internals. The market currently rewards the latter.

If this pattern continues, IDEs become specialist tools, not default ones. Truell seems to recognize that threat early. The risk is not that vibe built products collapse. It is that many never need to scale far enough for control to matter.

HOLLYWOOD

Hollywood Tested AI Creativity and Found Mostly Placeholders

In 2025, Hollywood finally stopped talking about AI in the abstract and started deploying it in visible ways. Studios expanded from narrow post production uses into text to video tools, synthetic dubbing, and AI assisted animation experiments. The shift felt real because money and brand names were attached. Yet by year end, there was still no widely watched series or film that demonstrated why AI belongs at the center of video creation rather than on the margins.

That gap matters because video is the most unforgiving medium. Narrative pacing, performance nuance, and cultural context are not optional. They are the product. Most AI video tools in 2025 struggled beyond short clips and novelty formats. Production workflows that rely on hundreds of specialists were reduced to prompt driven outputs that saved time but lost coherence. Cost reduction showed up faster than creative upside, which inverted the original promise.

The signal from 2025 is not that AI failed Hollywood. It is that video remains a hard problem. Generative models are early, brittle, and better at fragments than full works. If progress continues, AI will first reshape pipelines, localization, and iteration speed. Breakthrough storytelling comes later, if at all.

QUICK HITS

Carnegie Mellon researchers enabled everyday objects to use AI to anticipate needs and move autonomously.
OpenAI is hiring a senior safety executive to address emerging risks from advanced AI, including mental health and cybersecurity concerns.
South Korea’s ECOPEACE is piloting its AI-powered autonomous water-cleanup systems in Singapore and the UAE to drive global expansion.
Anthropic rolled out a Claude Chrome extension and upgraded Claude Code for paid users, deepening integration across browser and developer tools.
China has drafted sweeping AI rules that would mandate human intervention and strictly ban chatbots from encouraging suicide, violence, or addictive use.

TRENDING

Daily AI Launches

Giselle has launched a visual AI workflow builder requiring zero infra setup, capable of running complex tasks using mixed models.
BizCard has launched an E-ink business card that displays live profiles for seamless, phone-free networking.
Dropstone has released v3, an AI coding tool that uses swarm architecture to simulate timelines and prevent errors before they occur.
YTuong has launched a NotebookLM Chrome extension adding bulk operations and multi-language support to Google NotebookLM.

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